Nalo Hopkinson’s New Novels Bring the Mojo

Photo: David C. Findlay

Jamaican-born author Nalo Hopkinson burst onto the publishing scene in 1997, when her novel Brown Girl in the Ring, set in present-day Toronto and featuring supernatural events drawn from Caribbean folklore, won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. She followed that up with a string of other successes, including 2001’s short story collection Skin Folk, which was acclaimed by The New York Times. Her two latest novels are Sister Mine and The Chaos, though fans may have heard them called by different names. The titles of both books — originally known as Donkey and Taint — were changed at the behest of publishers, who said that the sexual connotations of Taint in particular were making people giggle.

“I’ve learned now to have a second title in reserve,” says Hopkinson in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “Because frequently I come up with titles that seem to make editors’ hair fall out.”

These novels are the first she’s published since The New Moon’s Arms in 2007. Recent years have been hard for her, as serious health problems made it impossible for her to write, which led to a prolonged period of destitution and homelessness. But now things are starting to turn around. A new teaching gig at the University of California, Riverside, is providing a steady paycheck, and that financial cushion has enabled her to focus on improving her health and getting back to writing. Throughout it all, she’s been grateful for the support of fans and colleagues.

“I love science fiction,” says Hopkinson. “There are ways in which this community kept me and my partner alive through some very, very bad years, and I will always acknowledge that.”

Listen to our complete interview with Nalo Hopkinson in Episode 81 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), in which she discusses the sexual subtext of “Goblin Market,” the fallout from RaceFail ’09, and how she came up with a character who used to be Jimi Hendrix’s guitar. Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Matt London, creator of the web series Space Pirates in Space, joins hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley for a panel discussion on the weirdest movies ever.

Nalo Hopkinson on writing Sister Mine:

“I was writing that scene and got to the moment where Makeda asks something about Jimi Hendrix, and the guy leans forward and says, ‘I used to be his guitar.’ And that just came out of my fingers. I was just typing and there it was, and then I thought, okay, that’s cool. What? How did that happen? Did Jimi Hendrix even have a British guitar at any point? Because this guy is British. What did I just do? So then I had to do some research and figure out a bit more about Hendrix and his music and his guitars, and it also went on to inform the story. That one was completely random.”

Nalo Hopkinson on her 2009 ICFA speech on race in science fiction:

“You look at science fiction, and look how often it talks about being alien, being alienated about the other. Look at the number of blue people — Avatar I’m looking at you. And it is now easier to find people of color in science-fiction literature and media, but the issues of representation are still really, really troubling. The way they took Avatar: The Last Airbender, that was a pan-Asian world, and made the protagonist white. Neil Gaiman talking about Anansi Boys — it was either Anansi Boys or American Gods — getting an offer for a film production of it and then having the producer say, ‘Well, of course we’re going to make everyone white, because black people aren’t interested in fantasy,’ so he pulled it. The kind of thing you’ll hear white writers say about not wanting to write any people of color for one reason or another, but it all boils down to ‘because I don’t want people to be mad at me.’ So the issues are still very, very much there, even though we talk about race a lot in the literature, there’s still this idea of ‘Well, if we make this person blue and give them pointy ears, then we don’t have to actually talk about what’s happening in the real world.’ And those of us who live in racialized bodies feel that lack, we feel that erasure. So yes, there was something quite deliberate in my doing half the speech as an alien.”

Matt London on Stanley Kubrick:

“Kubrick I think is a great example. You don’t think of him as being a director of the weird, but all of his movies are really bizarre. 2001 may be the quintessential ambiguous movie. I mean, if any movie has an ending that’s still debated fifty years later…. And the set for The Shining was designed in a way that is deliberately impossible to exist. You walk into an interior office that you know is in the center of the hotel, with walls on all four sides, but you go inside the office and you can see a window facing out onto a sunny day. Or you go down a hallway and you see that there are no rooms on one side — it’s an open lobby — but then the wall that separates the open lobby from the hallway has all these room doors. And you don’t notice any of these mistakes — if they’re really mistakes — as you’re watching the film, but as you watch it you start to feel this sense of unease and you’re not sure why, and it’s because your sense of direction is being messed with.”

Matt London on “2 to 4 movies”:

“Delicatessen falls into a category of film that I love that I call ‘2 to 4 movies,’ because you have to watch them between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. That’s the only time you want to watch a movie like that because it’s so strange and your brain’s not working at top speed, and so it completely blows your mind…. When I was a kid I had a friend who was super-rich, and his parents would buy pay-per-view channels and let them run 24 hours a day, like it was cable. And so I would hang out in his brother’s room where the TV was on — his brother had gone out on a date or something — and I was terrified to touch anything in his brother’s room — I was scared to death of this guy. So he would leave his TV on when he went out of the house, which is a phenomenon I’ve never been able to understand, but I know that some people do it. So I’d go into his brother’s room and the TV would be on some pay-per-view channel, and I’d be terrified to turn it off or change the channel. And so one night Interview with the Vampire was on three times in a row, and so I ended up watching the movie from midnight to two, two to four, and again from four to six, and it got weirder every single time.”